Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Fabian checks himself. He knows that Humans, capitalized, do not. Perhaps humans did, back in the Old Empire days. But he thinks not. He thinks that they were more efficient than that, for he can see that to excavate out a city like this would be far more work than simply placing stone on stone. And besides, the drone is lower now, to the level of the crumbling roofs. He should be seeing inside one of the buildings, but there is no inside. The entryway is just a front, a doorway to nothing but wind-blasted stone. The city is a ruin and the ruin is a fake. Some long time ago, someone came here and made a facsimile of a city, using manifestly non-optimal methods over who knows how long, for no reason Fabian can possibly imagine.

  Fabian’s unease increases. Portiids traditionally react to the unknown with rampant curiosity, but Fabian is feeling the creeping fear of his forefathers who lived in a world where most things would try to kill them.

  He checks out the drone’s parameters. It can go high; he sends it high, scudding far enough that the abandoned non-city becomes a streetmap, the altiplano itself just topology and relief written in late-afternoon shadow. A pair of the ragged kite-things billow past, startling him but paying absolutely no heed to the drone, which is not part of their world, irrelevant as Fabian himself save that they would make quite a mess if their trailing trains got caught in the rotors.

  He sends the drone over the plateau’s edge, looking down on a vast expanse of red desert, disfigured by technicolour lakes like violent acne where some life or inorganic process stains the water angry rainbow colours. He sees stretches of mottling where some lifeform turns its darkness to drink the waning sunlight, and other regions of brown and rust-orange and even green, actual green, that tell of other life—little microbiomes around a meagre resource that lets some alien thing claw life out of the interior of the hot, dusty planet’s single continent.

  He sees another city. It is ten times larger than the mere hamlet near their crash site; another grid, or perhaps an expansion, a larger map that contains within it a copy of the smaller. The same city: ruined, false. Fabian sends the drone further, watching its battery indicator tumble but unable not to satisfy his curiosity and feed his fear.

  He fiddles with the drone’s cameras, reconfiguring them for a longer range. Another ghost-metropolis is on the horizon, on the banks of a line drawn in the sand that is a river before and after but, for as long as it runs through the city’s bounds, is straight as a canal. He pattern-matches what he can see of the grid; it is the same city, a human city from a dead world, here on this distant living one.

  Just as he is turning the drone back for the journey home, he sees movement in the streets. For many beats of his heart (that long organ extending along the dorsal line of his abdomen) he is clenched at the controls, the drone spinning lazily in the air. He cannot move. His mind teeters on the point of fugue again. He has seen this thing before. Or, no, he has seen something that is to this as this false ruin is to the real city it must have been copied from.

  It does not walk as a human walks, but its shape is something of a human’s shape. Fabian has no uncanny valley where humans are concerned but even he is gripped by the awful discontinuity of it, as it shuffles slowly towards the drone’s vantage point.

  It is built of shells and pieces of nameless creatures and shards of rock and dust. Back on Kern’s World there is an insect called a caddisfly, the adults of which are brief-lived breeding machines (and also delicious). The larvae are sly aquatic ambushers that hide from prey and predators alike by constructing a casing about themselves with pieces of pebble and reed.

  This thing has made itself a human shape in just the same way. Its progress is boneless, awkward, utterly unconvincing, but it has made itself gloves and sleeves and boots. And a helmet, because it is not just mimicking a human, but a human in an encounter suit, an old one, similar to the antique up in the station.

  The polished faceplate of the helm is a stone worn smooth by the hands of running water, and it tilts to stare so that he can see the drone reflected there, just as if it were glass.

  Then the drone is lifting away—only belatedly does he recognize his own handiwork, his palps on the controls. He hauls it backwards and skywards, the camera fixed on that oddly forlorn figure. It does not raise that “visor” or lift a rock-gloved hand towards the retreating remote. Instead, it slumps and shifts, as though some internal structure has been abruptly removed, and then the apparition breaks apart, individual shells and balls of detritus rolling (crawling?) away into the gathering shadows, and Fabian has the drone flee and re-watches the appalling footage and wonders what he can even say to Viola about it.

  6.

  Kern, Avrana Kern, formerly of the Lightfoot and now with her consciousness situated, by her own estimation, somewhere between that vessel’s crashed remains and her orbital telepresence, probes the live comms channels of the station carefully. The infestation looked to be purely an organic thing, but something was transmitting the xenobiology lesson which drew her here. Was the amorphous entity that attacked Meshner also the sender of that signal? Had it once been Erma Lante, or indeed had there ever been such an individual?

  Memory pieces fall into place as her ants replenish enough for her to recover and access them. Detail level is coarse but, very shortly before the attack, Helena had been talking about the cautionary recordings the octopuses had retained. There had been a human woman named Lante. That was thousands of years ago.

  So: Lante had been studying the alien ecosphere and her work was recorded in the station, preserved from the elder days, until some random system began playing those recordings…? Kern backtracks on her own logic, even as other parts of her are feeling out the electronic architecture of the station, cautious as a bomb disposal expert, while still other parts of her are trying to regenerate the systems of the Lightfoot, one such system being herself.

  She relegates the possibility of some errant automatic system because whatever was transmitting had reacted and changed its behaviour in apparent response to her queries. A computer, then, following some corrupted programming, except she had searched exhaustively for any such system and found none. Perhaps it had gone into hiding, cut off somewhere in the orbiting hulk. Perhaps not.

  The organic thing had been in that room, with that terminal. It had been confined to a human shape, with a console designed (roughly) for that shape. And yet it had been… ooze. Not a mollusc, not an arachnid, not a thing of Earth at all, but in any event a thing whose closest analogue might be some kind of slime mould.

  More ants, more pieces, a greater breadth of thought, backup archives located and enabled. Kern is feeling more herself.

  Slime moulds on Earth were a common research subject. Scientists had studied them for centuries because of their self-organizing capability, that enabled a loose mass of individual cells to act as a macro-organism, a predator even, all without any neurology whatsoever.

  She diverts valuable attention to access the Lante Diaries. The content is garbled, partly incomprehensible. Kern delegates part of herself to assimilate this trove of knowledge but she is short of resources and analysing the contradictory, garbled document requires human- or Portiid-level functioning. She is stretching herself too thin.

  She wants Meshner back. It is not a good use of her stretched resources. She is not acting on the instruction of her crew, who are rather more concerned about their own survival right now. Why, then, is she set on this path? She tells herself that solving this question is not a good use of her resources, and even as she does she recognizes the stance as purely self-serving.

  Theory 1: her artificial decision-making processes (the ones that feel, to her, like real decision-making processes because that is what it is like to be this attenuated autonomous outgrowth of the original living woman Avrana Kern) have become dangerously compromised by the experience of simulated emotion within Meshner’s implant and brain, so that she is prioritizing the recovery of that facility over other more germane capabilities like long-term l
ife support.

  Theory 2: guilt. She drove Meshner to his doom, because of her obsession with not only finding something like herself in the station, but experiencing that finding through the medium of Meshner’s mind. Of course, guilt is not something she can actually feel right now, beyond a logical acknowledgement of her culpability, but if she could locate and retrieve Meshner then she would be able to feel all the guilt she wanted, all the self-indulgent, cloying, marvellous guilt she just knows is out there ready to be experienced…

  Theory 3: Kern is damaged. She damaged herself by playing with qualia she should have left well alone, and that has been compounded by the crash, during which she prioritized the survival of the crew over her own integrity. Repairs are underway, but right now she is not in a position to make fully informed decisions, including the decision to tell Viola of that incapacity. So: she will find Meshner, if Meshner is to be found, because it is a bad decision and right now that is indicative of her state of repair.

  And then she finds him, or she finds his implant—still live, still riddled with those open comms vulnerabilities that made it so useful to her.

  It comes down to a simple calculation. If the thing that holds the station is capable of setting such a trap, then this could definitely be a trap. If Kern wants to discover the fate of Meshner she will have to risk that trap and rely on her own ability to extricate herself or turn it back on its creator.

  She considers that she is not in a position to reliably make that simple calculation of risk.

  She goes in.

  Not heedlessly. She accesses the implant like a swimmer easing herself into the water, with as few ripples as possible. Meshner himself would not know. She does not interface with the sensorium within, no matter how much certain parts of her are prompting her to do so. She accesses its lowest operating level, calling up status reports. Is there any activity in the implant; is there any activity in Meshner’s brain?

  She re-sends the query three times because the answer seems outside reasonable parameters, but Meshner’s brain is very active indeed. The implant is working at capacity, far too busy to cause her any difficulties. In fact it is reconfiguring itself, following its own rules, making its use of computing power more efficient so that it can spoof more sensory data to its user; that elegant little flourish of Fabian’s that allows the implant to restructure its Human-tech electronic architecture as though it was Portiid organic engineering.

  But what is it doing? An odd time for Meshner to be reliving his memories or accessing Portiid Understandings.

  She only has one way of finding out, and that is to access the higher level functioning of the implant, and thereby become part of the madness, whatever that madness might be. And it’s crowded in there. If she goes in, she will be stretching her consciousness in an arc that encompasses the downed ship, the drone and the implant, lending out her meagre, scavenged processing power to become part of the greater whole. That is a trap of a whole other kind, a set of jaws she will be putting her head into of her own volition. If she cannot extricate her logic from that of the virtual environment she enters (for reasons of, for example, deep and enduring damage to her own decision-making processes) then she will be dooming Fabian, Viola and Zaine as well as herself. And there may not be anything of Meshner to save. The activity she is witnessing, for all it has the shape of meaning, might just be a storm of defective synapses, natural and artificial. It might just be screaming.

  But she is Avrana Kern, and one part of her that is very much intact, front and centre is her sense of her own ability to master any situation. Those safeguards and gatekeepers that should have tempered this faith in herself are offline, and so she does what an Avrana Kern does in the circumstances. She takes charge. She goes in.

  7.

  “Maybe they want you as a live host for it,” Portia suggests darkly. Helena shudders, but at the same time that doesn’t feel right, and she has come to the very unscientific conclusion that gut feelings about the octopuses and their intentions are a good yardstick. So much of their communication is just gut feelings, after all, modified by sporadic data on the sub-channel, as though a wildly invested artist is jabbering about a new project while, in her other ear, an accountant dryly intones just how much it will cost.

  What her gut feeling tells her is that the octopus faction she is addressing, in the person of whichever of its members feel most engaged with the idea at the time, is after something different. An entire section of their conversation seems to have no relevance to anything else but they are enormously excited about it. Helena sees clashing, rainbow shades she never marked in any of them before. And then the data comes in, the complex strands of numbers, equations in formats that Helena’s headware and slate together cannot even display properly.

  “It looks like…” Portia turns the slate in her palps, the figures reflecting in her huge main eyes. “Numbers,” she finishes, annoyed at her own limitations, her lack of control. “Deep physics.”

  Whatever it is, the locals—these locals—are very keen on it, and Helena decides it is the point of what they are after, that everything else is just serendipity or complication.

  She and Portia have already agreed to go. The only thing delaying the departure has been the garrulousness of the locals, their insistence in explaining in great detail things that their guests are not emotionally, linguistically or just plain intellectually able to appreciate. Only the enthusiasm comes through, and that is weirdly relatable, almost endearing. Helena had been like that about her Portiid translation project, trying to get out a thousand-word concept into a hundred-word pitch for her academic superiors.

  They care, she decides. Whatever they are about, they care deeply in the moment that they are about it, and then the next moment they might not care at all, or care about some other thing, but the threads of the things they are invested in go on, and come back to them. All that factional shifting, but she feels that individual priorities just ebb and flow like tides within them, rather than being swept away.

  Soon after that, and little the wiser, they are aboard a ship.

  The ship itself is smaller and more elaborately shaped than the enormous spheres the octopus space navy apparently favours. This one is four globes, ranged from large to small in a tapering chain, each one fitted with a separate set of what Helena thinks are probably drives rather than weapons. And why? Does it separate, every sphere its own escape capsule? She hopes she won’t have to find out. The penultimate sphere has obviously been the subject of recent cephalopod engineering, however, because it is full of air.

  She had wondered about the logistics. The octopuses are water creatures suspended in a watery medium, cushioned against any stresses of acceleration, but Helena knows enough physics to worry about the airy cavities in her body and what precisely would happen if a dense medium around her underwent a sudden change of pressure as she hung unprotected within it. The solution, according to her hosts, is a small sphere lined with some manner of transparent gel, presumably to serve as a cushion against acceleration, although Helena determines she will keep her suit and helmet on at all times to avoid getting mired and ending up smothered in the walls. There is nothing else, none of the clutter the locals evidently like, their bars and posts to cling to. The whole thing looks far more like a prison cell than anything she has been a tenant of so far.

  From the inside she can still see blurrily out in all directions. On board the forward section of the vessel a handful of octopuses are either performing vital pre-flight checks or just attacking the control consoles in fits of pique. Much of her view is blocked by the internal architecture which fills the centre of many of the spheres, making tiny planetoids of rugged sea floor for the crew to crawl about on or hide within. The technology is far from anything human hands might design; she can recognize almost none of its function.

  Beyond the walls of the ship, in the greater hangar space beyond, she can see more of the locals, and her translation software begins to tell her belatedly
that all is not well. She had fallen into the trap of thinking that she was dealing with a united civilization, hierarchically organized and capable of being treated as a single entity. Whether that could ever be a possibility is a point for the historians and sociologists, but in this solar system it is actively excluded by the nature of the inhabitants. The cephalopods gathering outside are looking angrier and angrier, and the movements of the crew are definitely more hurried, their moods visibly lightening with worry. It comes to Helena that she and Portia might not have been released from prison so much as stolen, and this whole mission might be going counter to the wishes of the collective zeitgeist, insofar as this culture even has one.

  Just as she thinks there might be an actual angry mob gathering, everything beyond her curved wall falls away, a sudden force pushing her elbow-deep into the gel. By the time she has righted herself and assisted Portia, they are clear of the world-like bulk of the orbital globe that held them, spat out across the great roiled surface of the watery world and accelerating fast enough to keep them glued to the back of their compartment.

  The tormented face of the planet whips past beneath them for the first hours of the journey, a merciful blur shrouded in cloud; then they have completed their slingshot and are casting off into the great dark, all their engines still on full burn. Portia is feeding her data gleaned from the octopus transmissions, as best she can under the crush of acceleration. They are devouring all their fuel, exhausting reserves, soon to be on a one-way trip to nowhere at all in a piece of utter rocket science lunacy. And the drives do not let up, keeping to their remorseless acceleration, getting them rapidly clear of the large and lumbering ships that might decide to come after them. Helena, a prisoner both of molluscs and physics, can do absolutely nothing but fight to keep breathing as the force of their escape pummels her.